What do you think?
Rate this book
Beginner's Guide (Oneworld Publications)
Classical Music
Pick up where Classic FM leaves offWhat does classical music mean to the Western World? How has it transformed over the centuries? With such a rich tradition, what relevance does it have today? Julian Johnson inspires readers to explore the field, and examines how music is related to some of the big ideas of Western experience including spirituality, emotion, the weight of history, and self identity.
- GenresMusicClassical Music
Audio CD
First published October 1, 2009
22 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 10, 2022
julians a very engaging lecturer but id thought the book would be a bit dry considering i read it for revision but it actually wasnt even bad
four stars did what it needed to feeling somewhat prepared for my exam tomorrow
four stars did what it needed to feeling somewhat prepared for my exam tomorrow
January 3, 2025
I finished the audiobook of Richard Fawkes’ The History of Classical Music immediately prior to finishing An Audio Guide to Classical Music by Julian Johnson, so I will review the latter partly informed by my experience of the former.
Fawkes’ audiobook was exceptionally pithy, and gave the perfect level of detail for an introduction to the history of classical music. (I may have been moored a little more easily in the pithiness, however, given a basic understanding of and name recognition in the history of classical music. I did hear from a friend that he was finding it moved quite fast.) Fawkes’ book also benefited from perfect reading, and, most importantly, it made full use of the audiobook format, with frequent inclusions of clips from the music under discussion.
This is in stark contrast to Johnson’s audio guide, where really the first thing that must be said of it is that it included no music, despite being in audio format!
Johnson’s book provides greater detail and conceptual depth than Fawkes’, and was therefore an excellent follow-up to it. Fawkes focuses on the bare historical facts of when and who (including basic biographical information about composers), as well as some purely descriptive aspects of the music theory (such as, explaining that polyphony is constructed of multiple interweaving lines).
Johnson’s book deepens the exploration of classical music into analyses of how and why the music may have come about when it did - for example, modernism and highly abstract or aleatory music as a response to the horrors of the old world culminating in the two world wars. In this way, he also provides some normative analysis of music and music theory, including what contemporaries or later critics may have said about a particular movement. Yet it is a work of history: he merely presents others’ arguments, but never deigns to pass his own normative judgment and tell us what we should consider better or worse to listen to.
An especial strength in comparison to Fawkes’ book is the treatment of modern/20th century music. Fawkes is liable to treat this period as uncategorisable. This is eminently understandable given the complexity needed to categorise the music of this period, probably simply in sheer excess of the length he had to hand to create a summary account. But I left Fawkes feeling a bit unsure what had actually happened in this stretch of musical history.
Johnson’s task of explaining the why and how of musical composition and consumption is most welcome here, for he spends time teasing apart the period, suggesting heuristics for its plethora of penchants and movements which guide the listener to make sense of it all.
I particularly like the way he both makes a distinction between, and synthesises, serialism and aleatory music. Serialism (as practiced by the New Viennese School of Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern) as the idea that music should be highly abstract, and ordered by rational rather than sensual metrics designed by the human mind, distinct from aleatory music (as practiced by, for example, John Cage) or the idea that ‘music’ can be found in anything, such as the chance sounds perceived in the duration of Cage’s 4’33, music discovered in the world around us rather than designed from the world within us. Yet Johnson manages to bring the two movements into the same orbit of periodisation - why were these two movements both occurring in the mid-20th century? Both can be seen as rejections of the world that came before, and to some extent the ability to find instinctive beauty in the human soul, after the horrors their century saw.
I also love his treatment of Debussy. If instead of with Schoenberg and the Austro-Germans, we start with Debussy and follow the French and Russians through the 20th century, we get a very different narrative of music. He says that Debussy was concerned, in a new way, with the specific sonority of his music (the specific instrumentation, the precise sonorous and resultingly sentimental effects of each sound) as a way of creating atmosphere. Debussy’s music, already in L’Apres but especially by the time of Mer, can be thought of as tone paintings. Upon hearing this, and relistening to L’Apres, I came to appreciate the truth of this: modern music, maybe especially outside the classical tradition, seems highly preoccupied with the creation of specific atmosphere. Johnson links Debussy to the later sensibilities of electronic music. Perhaps Debussy is the forerunner to ambient music, Ghibli soundtracks, and all of that genre-non-specific music whose every sound strokes the brush of atmosphere over one's ears (those that come to mind right now: Popul Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Maria).
Fawkes’ audiobook was exceptionally pithy, and gave the perfect level of detail for an introduction to the history of classical music. (I may have been moored a little more easily in the pithiness, however, given a basic understanding of and name recognition in the history of classical music. I did hear from a friend that he was finding it moved quite fast.) Fawkes’ book also benefited from perfect reading, and, most importantly, it made full use of the audiobook format, with frequent inclusions of clips from the music under discussion.
This is in stark contrast to Johnson’s audio guide, where really the first thing that must be said of it is that it included no music, despite being in audio format!
Johnson’s book provides greater detail and conceptual depth than Fawkes’, and was therefore an excellent follow-up to it. Fawkes focuses on the bare historical facts of when and who (including basic biographical information about composers), as well as some purely descriptive aspects of the music theory (such as, explaining that polyphony is constructed of multiple interweaving lines).
Johnson’s book deepens the exploration of classical music into analyses of how and why the music may have come about when it did - for example, modernism and highly abstract or aleatory music as a response to the horrors of the old world culminating in the two world wars. In this way, he also provides some normative analysis of music and music theory, including what contemporaries or later critics may have said about a particular movement. Yet it is a work of history: he merely presents others’ arguments, but never deigns to pass his own normative judgment and tell us what we should consider better or worse to listen to.
An especial strength in comparison to Fawkes’ book is the treatment of modern/20th century music. Fawkes is liable to treat this period as uncategorisable. This is eminently understandable given the complexity needed to categorise the music of this period, probably simply in sheer excess of the length he had to hand to create a summary account. But I left Fawkes feeling a bit unsure what had actually happened in this stretch of musical history.
Johnson’s task of explaining the why and how of musical composition and consumption is most welcome here, for he spends time teasing apart the period, suggesting heuristics for its plethora of penchants and movements which guide the listener to make sense of it all.
I particularly like the way he both makes a distinction between, and synthesises, serialism and aleatory music. Serialism (as practiced by the New Viennese School of Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern) as the idea that music should be highly abstract, and ordered by rational rather than sensual metrics designed by the human mind, distinct from aleatory music (as practiced by, for example, John Cage) or the idea that ‘music’ can be found in anything, such as the chance sounds perceived in the duration of Cage’s 4’33, music discovered in the world around us rather than designed from the world within us. Yet Johnson manages to bring the two movements into the same orbit of periodisation - why were these two movements both occurring in the mid-20th century? Both can be seen as rejections of the world that came before, and to some extent the ability to find instinctive beauty in the human soul, after the horrors their century saw.
I also love his treatment of Debussy. If instead of with Schoenberg and the Austro-Germans, we start with Debussy and follow the French and Russians through the 20th century, we get a very different narrative of music. He says that Debussy was concerned, in a new way, with the specific sonority of his music (the specific instrumentation, the precise sonorous and resultingly sentimental effects of each sound) as a way of creating atmosphere. Debussy’s music, already in L’Apres but especially by the time of Mer, can be thought of as tone paintings. Upon hearing this, and relistening to L’Apres, I came to appreciate the truth of this: modern music, maybe especially outside the classical tradition, seems highly preoccupied with the creation of specific atmosphere. Johnson links Debussy to the later sensibilities of electronic music. Perhaps Debussy is the forerunner to ambient music, Ghibli soundtracks, and all of that genre-non-specific music whose every sound strokes the brush of atmosphere over one's ears (those that come to mind right now: Popul Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Maria).
August 12, 2025
Why is classical the third period in classical music
July 10, 2016
What it lacks it breadth it more than compensates in readability. Not an ideal guide, but it's hard to imagine a better introduction with such brevity. Read it, fake it, and then, hopefully, go after the real deal...
August 7, 2013
Very good survey. Focuses on the development of musical culture.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews